366 Songs 365: Coming Up Roses

A song that’s beautiful in a particularly ugly, self-aware and urban sense (“The moon is a sickle cell/It’ll kill you in time”), “Coming Up Roses” was the soundtrack to a particularly weird and unhealthy post-break-up period of my life way back when, and its apathetic shuffle and broken-hearted poetry felt particularly apt at the time for the person I was back then. To me now, there’s a lot of nostalgia and memory wrapped up in it, but it feels like a nascent, incomplete version of everything that Elliott Smith would come to embody in later life. There’s a hint of his use of harmony vocals and surprising melody, but the only thing that I have think of when I think of Smith now that’s truly there in this song is the fragility. There’s a sense that this song is a promise of what lies ahead, but one so barely-there that it could burst at any second like a bubble floating around in the air, waiting to disappear.